I'm normally one to scoff at privatization of things like space exploration, but frankly finding the best ways to lower costs is precisely the kind of thing the private sector does best. Let 30 little companies work on the problem. There's plenty of a market in satellite launches to finance this. The ones with ideas that don't pan out will go belly-up, and the one or two that hit on good solutions will survive. There's no possible way a single organization (eg: NASA) can do that job properly.

NASA needs to be working on things that we just flat out don't know how to do, or it would be totally impractical for more than one group to attempt.

It sounds like they went through a lot of effort to make this agreement with Russia. Why on earth someone would do that, when the country doesn't operate under Rule of Law anyway? The current regime has shown time after time that it considers itself bound neither by its own laws, nor its signed treaties. When a company starts to do well, they nationalize it and throw the former owners in jail. When they want some territory, they take it.

If you agree to any of their laws or treaties, they only bind you, not them. So why bother agreeing to anything with them?

It isn't a matter of "proper funding". The current ideology is that large corporations are just plain better at everything that identically-sized groups that happen to be part of the government. Thus increasing funding to a non-military government agency for any reason is heresy.

There probably will eventually be future missions to Titan, but they will be for harvesting all that methane and natural gas so it can be hauled back to Earth and burned up in our atmosphere.

Its popular for a reason. How do we know what exactly is required for life? Every time we've thought of a "requirement" before, we've looked somewhere on earth that doesn't meet those requirements and found life. Our knowledge of what is needed is limited, and frankly horribly blinded by our own experience. We know the mechanisms that we can see that life on earth uses, but that doesn't mean that's the only mechanism (or even the best possible mechanism). Humans can collectively be quite creative, but we are nothing compared to the universe at large.

Actually, not a horrible or unusual policy on /. , but you probably should read it before making assumptions about the contents. It keeps you from saying stupidly wrong thing like this.

They had a much better defense. If you know nothing else about two teams in the superbowl, root for the one with the better defense.

In fact, Nate actually did predict this, with a 70% certainty the previous year. I guess he forgot. :-)

The reference implementation of UEFI is open source, and some vendors use it as a basis for their firmware.

Unfortunately, most Coreboot-using devices are tied down and do not allow non-interactive booting with custom firmware (if they allow custom firmware at all).

This incident was a very small aside after a long history of (unrelated except in a common culture) horrific events that happened to her. It was only brought up as the straw that broke the camel's back, not as THE reason she left. If that same series of events had happened to me, I would have left far before the hula-hooping thing happened. If it had happened to one of my daughters, I'd be lucky to not be in jail right now.

Anyone who sizes upon this as a reason to "ignore anything she says", pretty clearly came into this story looking really hard to find a reason to do just that. It says way more about you than about her.

I know Slashdot takes a lot of heat for reposting old stories, but this one is truly impressive. Its 45 years old! Most Slashdot readers weren't even born yet. The Beatles were still together. I was 2.

Its like the editors went, oh old stories huh? You think these are old stories? I'll show you old stories, mofo!

Tomorrow: Jules Verne in 1877 suggested it might be possible to bootstrap space navigation by hitching a ride on a passing comet (tagged: screwyouwhiners)

I dunno...

For one thing, a bog standard Tesla already has pretty good protection. The NTSA actually had to make up new tests to find any kind of limits to the thing. For example, when they tried doing standard crashes into poles, it kept breaking their poles. They flat out could not get the thing to roll over. You'd think with that as a standard to start from, they could achieve some pretty great things if given the extra custom design latitude and budget a POTUS limo vendor is typically given.

For another, with the extra space under a stretch limo, as the article points out they ought to be able to pack enough extra battery to make up for the extra weight.

For another, electric cars already have much more power at lower revs than gasoline cars. I'd think that would be a pretty attractive feature for people worried about someone trying to block off their vehicle in an ambush.

Back when I worked for one of the top defense contractors, they really didn't pay us very competitively. I was looking around, and encouraged a good friend of mine to do so as well. He was a really good engineer, and deserved better. Unfortunately, he told me he couldn't.

You see, a few months after hiring on right out of college, he discovered he had diabetes. Our employer's insurance continued covering him (because they had to), but if he tried to go anywhere else nothing diabetes-related would be covered, as it would be considered a "preexisting condition". He was trim, and healthy and kept good care of himself, but every 2 years or so something would go wrong and he'd end up in the hospital for a couple of weeks. Without coverage for this, he'd be a financial disaster. He was stuck working there.

This is the point where a person starts to wonder how many other folks like him were out there. How many people had developed conditions that made them essentially indentured servants? And how much had this situation screwed over the natural economy that our country should have?

I know "pre-existing condition" exceptions are outlawed now. But our current Congress tried to reinstate them more than 50 times, last session. We're just one good Republican election away from getting them back.

A very good analysis. My only complaint with it is that a lot of it is conjecture based on the theory that the money supply is currently being increased, which is not actually the case. The Fed is not printing money, and in fact is not capable of doing so. It might be a very good idea right now, for reasons you are quite eloquent about, but the agency that would have to do it would be the Treasury, not the Fed.

The basic situation is that we went through very nasty credit-induced recession. We don't know what's typical for such things really, but the last one is now called "The Great Depression", and took more than a decade (and some say a major war) to recover from. So we should be thankful things aren't far worse, but they still suck compared to a typical "recovery". There's a good chance it will recover on its own eventually, but for us humans "eventually" doesn't buy us groceries, so it would be a really good idea to do what we reasonably can to help it.

The problem there is that we are currently the proud holders of a congress that couldn't pass gas in a chili house. The political cynic in me would say that the Republican Congress doesn't want the economy to recover before the 2018 election, and is doing everything they can to stop recovery efforts. But even if you don't buy that, its undeniable that there's no way they are going to allow any further stimulus (that isn't war-related).

So this means that the Treasury department will simply not be allowed to print money to help us out of this, no matter how good of an idea it may seem. The only government agencies that are capable of acting are independent agencies, and of those the only one with a mission of looking after the economy is The Fed. They can't print money of course, but what they can do is effectively give free loans to banks (which they are doing), and take treasury securities out of circulation by increasing reserve requirements (which they are also doing). Both of these in theory ought to make it easier and more attractive for banks to give out loans and people to buy stocks.

Of course this means that those who don't want the economy stimulated now hate the Fed, and are spewing all kinds of vitrol against it. It doesn't matter much if there's any truth in their complaints, because what the Fed actually does is so arcane that nobody can refute lies without making the typical American's eyes glaze over.

Great point. Sadly, the rest devolved into another goofy anti-fed diatribe, from a different angle.

You may have noticed that inflation is actually at a historic low right now. So based on this external data, it doesn't really look like the money supply is being artificially increased right now, does it?

Well, that's because it isn't. What the Fed is doing to stimulate things right now is twofold: It is allowing banks to borrow money from it at almost no interest, and it is "buying" its own treasury securities to get them out of the market. There is no extra new cash flowing around the USA right now, and if the government wanted to do that, it would have to be the Treasury Department doing it, not the Fed.

So why the "printing money" meme? The cynic in my says its because the phrase tests well for Right-Wingers when they use it, and the truth is so complicated there's little danger of the fib going corrected.